Sympathy or Empathy

Would you like a little pathos with your morning coffee? How about the fraternal twins, sympathy and empathy, two sides of pathos that are currently consuming the minds of those who are promoting therapy culture.

Actually, in today’s America, people have sidelined sympathy in favor of empathy. They are agog about the capacity for empathy, as though there is some special moral virtue involved in feeling someone else’s feelings. 

Of course, if one wanted to be more churlish than usual, one would note that you can never really feel someone else’s feelings. You cannot feel my toothache and I cannot feel your ankle sprain. If I say that I can, I am faking it-- to what purpose it is not entirely clear.

Writing in the New York Times Pamela Paul throws some serious shade on this version of empathy:

In short, no matter how much an empath you may be, unless you have actually been in someone’s place, with all its experiences and limitations, you cannot understand where that person is coming from. The object of your empathy may find it presumptuous of you to think that you “get it.”

Expressing sympathy does not involve feeling someone else’s feelings. You express your sympathy when someone dies. You send sympathy cards, not empathy cards. You express sympathy by showing up for the funeral or the wake.

Surely, it does not mean that you know what it feels like to die or to lose a loved one. It does not matter how you feel about it all. Unfortunately, in our feeling-based culture we are more often concerned with whether we feel the right feelings than whether we perform the right social gestures.

There are no specific social gestures that we associate with empathy. Which might be the reason why the therapy culture has made it into a fetish. 

As Pamela Paul explains, serious thinkers nowadays disparage sympathy and elevate empathy. It is, dare one say, pathetic, but it is what it is.

She explains:

No wonder, one educator said to me that he was told in a recent diversity, equity and inclusion training program that “sympathy counts for nothing.” Sympathy, the session’s leader explained to school staff members, was seeing someone in a hole and saying, “Too bad you’re in a hole,” whereas empathy meant getting in the hole, too.

Perhaps you have heard about this hole. Brené Brown, the best-selling author, may be the one who popularized the hole metaphor, which makes a moral distinction between sympathy and empathy. “Empathy is a choice and it’s a vulnerable choice because in order to connect with you, I have to connect with something in myself that knows that feeling,” she says in a YouTube video.

We will avoid the obvious associations with holes or even with holiness, but doesn’t it strike you that Brown does not raise the question of what you should do to help a person get out of a hole. Regardless of whether or not you can feel his feelings, the real issue when someone has gotten stuck is-- how to get him unstuck. 

Dare we say that the seriously limited Brene Brown is indulging in girl talk. You might know that she has made a fetish of vulnerability, and cares about sharing feelings-- because that is something that women excel at. 

We recall here the thought of one Adam Smith, recalled by psychologist Paul Bloom in his book, Against Empathy, that when you see someone being treated unjustly you are very likely to share, not only his pain, but his inclination to avenge himself.

After all, what else explains the re-ascent of Donald Trump, but the simple fact that many people feel great empathy for someone who is being systematically persecuted by the judicial system. They share his anger and they want to right the injustice.

Pamela Paul emphasizes that empathy erases you. Since you are trying to feel what someone else is feeling, it obliterates your personal perspective. And it allows you to feel good about not doing anything to remedy the situation. Feeling vulnerable, empathetically, means you are powerless to do anything about it.

As for the injunction to share feelings, Paul suggests that we can never really feel anyone else’s feelings. If you, a middle class professional, suggest that you know how it feels to be a homeless vagrant, the vagrant might well think that you are insulting him.

And, of course, you need not feel his feelings to devise a plan for dealing with homelessness and vagrancy. If you feel the other person’s feelings, you will also feel the frustration of not knowing how to solve the problem.

Dare we mention that when a friend’s parent dies, you cannot do anything to change the outcome. Thus, you offer sympathy to make a formal connection with your friend. You affirm both of you as social beings.

And yet, when someone falls in a hole you ought not to sympathize or even to empathize. You should go to work helping him get out of the hole.

Paul explains:

That when someone blubbers uncontrollably next to you, you may not need to blubber, too, and the person may not want you to anyway. You could instead say, “I’m truly sorry” or “That’s so unfair.”

I do not want to pretend to be thoroughly up to date on the literature about empathy and sympathy. I find, nevertheless, that Paul has done an admirable job of distinguishing the two. More so since she understands clearly that you can never really feel someone else’s feelings. And that even if you could, it is hardly the most useful skill when it comes to getting along with other people.

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